Is Your Website Penalized? What’s in the Google Penalty List? Sneak Peek

Excessive Link Building won’t earn you high SERP rankings but will result in Google Penalty. As per the reports by Matt Cutts, over 400,000 manual actions are initiated every month by Google. That’s not it. Can you believe numerous websites have been blocked and penalized by Google? With the algorithmic updates including Penguin and Panda, most of the websites got hit by Google Penalty. Subsequently, 20,000 webmasters are requesting reconsideration every month. In simple words, only 5% of the websites that have been penalized are working to Recover from Google Penalty and constantly aiming to recover their rankings as well.

Site Check – Have You Been Penalized? What’s the Type of Google Penalty?

Is your website suffering from a manual or algorithmic penalty? Not to worry as this guide will help you walk through the solution to Recover from Google Penalty. Once you swim out of the penalty trap, you can get back to recover your lost rankings and traffic. For instance, you face a traffic drop, what to do next? Find out what has caused so and what are the possible penalties imposed on your website? Generally, there are two kinds of penalties encountered. Firstly, you might get a manual action from Google’s spam team. Secondly, there can be an algorithmic penalty.

1. Manual Penalty: Supposedly, you want to know whether your site is manually penalized by Google or not. Navigate to Google Webmaster Tools (Google Search Console) and find out if you have any new or pending notifications check to see if you have any new notifications. Below you can see an example of an “unnatural links” message:

If you got no warning messages on Google Webmaster then there’s some other cause for traffic drops.

2. Algorithmic Penalty: Now, let’s understand what type of algorithmic penalty your website is tagged. For this, you have to link the time period when you lost traffic with the date when a new algorithmic update got launched. In a few words, you need to keep a check on Google Algorithm Change History.

It’s recommended to stay updated with the latest tweaks in Google’s search algorithm.

Most popularly, the Panda algorithmic update focused on content quality, while the Penguin update was oriented towards backlinks and anchor text distribution.

Which Backlinks Got Your Website Penalized?

Let us get a clear understanding of which links are posing a potential threat to your website traffic and rankings in Google SERPs.

1. Website is containing links to websites that are penalized or banned from Google. If your website has backlinks from websites that are violating Google’s guidelines, then you have to remove them first. To check if the website is de-indexed from Google or not, simply search “site:mywebsite.com.”

2. Websites having duplicate content lead to low quality so you must avoid having links from such websites.

3. Websites unrelated to your niche should be removed as Google pays a lot of value to relevancy. Never have links from sites that are completely unrelated to your website as that might put a red flag.

4. Creating spam comments and forum profiles. Google strictly hates spammers. So, comments or forum posts that are done with the purpose of placing a link will lead your website penalized. Additionally, it’s better to avoid links from sidebars, footers, or widgets.

5. Avoid links from adult or gambling websites. Some other links or methods that lead to Google guidelines violations include cloaking, sneaky redirects, doorway pages, hacking, link schemes, automatically generated content, and irrelevant content stuffed with keywords.

6. Over 95% of Google penalties are the result of backlinks created to your profile. If your site has covered too many bad backlinks then you will lose your Google rankings. Do ensure to read Google’s Webmaster Guidelines before creating backlinks to your site.

Also Read: Undeniable Theory | How Mobile Apps Impact Digital Transformation Strategy?

What Happens When Google Blacklists Your Website?

• You will see warning messages on your website.
• Your website displays empty pages or redirects to another URL.
• You notice strange content from outside sources.
• Your website traffic goes low.
• Your Google Webmaster Tools account receives warnings over malicious code.
• Google fetches and shows weird pages or ads when your website is searched.
• You will see a strange source code in the header and footer section.
• Your website no longer appears in Google’s SERP results.
• You will see spam SEO links and redirects them to SERPs.
• Your website email will start to bounce.

Importantly, low-quality or bad-quality links are the roots of any Google Penalty.

In the final analysis…

Think of the time, Google has blacklisted your website. Feeling afraid of such negative and time taking consequences? Yes, you need to be scared as it takes most of your time once you are hit by Google Penalty. It’s always a great idea to create a new account with Google webmaster tools and perform regular website checkups. However, if you find any pits on your website, you should try several methods to recover from Google Penalty.

Imagine if you are no more available on the index page. Now, what’s the next damage control measure? Possibly, the site owner should be notified and the site should be disabled if required. Moreover, you can check Google’s notes about site maintenance. If necessary, it is best advised to seek professional help with site cleaning. Once done, inform Google by requesting a website review. Consequently, Google starts to recrawl your website and then reindexing your web pages.

Though the process is time taking, there are high chances of recovering the website successfully.